Since the beginning Scott’s blog, website, and podcast have been all about making money through Amazon Private Label sales. Scott will always be teaching people how to get started selling products on Amazon because it’s a great platform where buyers are already hanging out. You can test product ideas and start generating revenue right away. But if you put all your eggs in one basket – even the Amazon basket – you are at the mercy of the platform where you’ve put all those eggs. On this episode Scott begins talking about how you can begin to build your own platform, that you control, to sell your own products and have total control over the revenue you make.

The best way to build a sustainable business.

If you want to build a business that will benefit you financially over the long term you’re going to need to have entire control over the costs you have to pay to serve your customers – AND you’ll need to be able to interact with your customers freely. If you’ve been selling private label products on Amazon for any length of time you know that those are two things you DON’T have when using the Amazon platform. When you’ve got control over those things you’re able to make decisions and do promotions in a way that are able to move your business forward at a much more consistent and rapid pace. You can hear Scott’s outline of why this stuff matters, on this episode of The Amazing Seller.

Blogging to provide valuable content to your ideal customers is a great way to build a sales funnel.

There are many people who have built a significant business on the back of a blog. But if you want to go this route to build your own platform for product sales you need to know that it’s a very crowded space – which only means you’ll have to do an excellent job at it. As you blog, adding valuable content that helps your ideal audience or customer you’ll be building the trust your audience needs to feel comfortable purchasing your product. And in the meantime, you’re building systems into your blog that captures the email addresses of those who come to your blog. It’s an amazing thing that really works. You’ll want to hear Scott’s approach to this idea on this episode.

You can use a giveaway to build an email list and stimulate sales.

If you want to start building your own mailing list of people who are interested in your products you can do it right away by doing a giveaway. A previous guest on Scott’s show – Mike Jackness – did this with amazing results and got thousands of email subscribers. You can use those emails later to provide a discount to those who did not win the contest, provide them valuable content to help them with their particular area of interest relating to your products, and to promote future products in your market to increase future sales. Scott walks through the details of how to set up an effective giveaway on this episode.

If you want to start building a business, Amazon is a great place to do it.

If you’ve never sold a product or service online before, there’s no better and easier place to get your feet wet than by selling on Amazon. It sounds intimidating at first and there are lots of things to learn and tweak as you go along, but you can do it. Scott’s focus up to this point has been to help you build and maximize a sales channel on Amazon so that you can build the life and business that you truly want. If you’d like to get in on one of Scott’s live workshops that teaches you the 5 steps to building an Amazon sales machine, you can find out how to get in on the next workshop by listening to this episode.

OUTLINE OF THIS EPISODE OF THE AMAZING SELLER

[0:03] Scott’s introduction to thIs episode of the podcast!

[3:40] How you can get into a free workshop about Amazon sales!

[5:32] The best way to build a sustainable business (VistaPrint example).

[8:11] What if you could pay $1 and make $5?

[11:35] What if you could follow up with customers immediately and remarket to them?

[14:59] Why having a person’s email address is powerful, now and in the future.

[19:39] The first kind of sales funnel: Creating blog content.

[29:00] The second kind of sales funnel: Create a giveaway.

[34:50] The third kind of sales funnel: The sales plus shipping offer.

TRANSCRIPT TAS 178

TAS 178 : Ask Scott Session #51 – Amazon FBA Questions

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:03] Scott: Well hey, hey what’s up everyone. Welcome back to another episode of The Amazing Seller Podcast, this is episode number 230 and today we’re going to be talking about three types of sales funnels for your business and how we can set ourselves up to survive without Amazon sales. I know when we first started this podcast it was all about Amazon but a lot of you had said, “Scott you know what I’d like to hear more about…

…marketing and about how to build my brand outside of Amazon so I don’t have to rely on Amazon.”

Now if you listened to my last episode or one of my last episodes, the last one was the Ask Scott session, the one before that episode 228 I talked all about how building your brand on rented land, in this case Amazon or eBay or if you were building niche sites back when or maybe you still are because they still do work if they’re done properly, you’re still building your brand on someone else’s platform.

If you’re building websites to rank inside of Google, well you’re relying on Google and if Google makes a change guess what you are wiped out and I’ve seen it happen to people very close to me. It can totally happen so we have to prepare ourselves for that and also diversify our brand. It’s like diversifying your income too like if you’re solely only relying on one source of revenue and you’re an entrepreneur it’s kind of risky because well if one of those channels goes away you’re kind of SOL.

We want to make sure that we set ourselves up to protect ourselves from that if at all possible. Same thing with Amazon, if Amazon wants to make a change they can do so and again I talked about that pretty extensively in episode 228. I would definitely recommend checking out that episode.

[00:02:00] Scott: You can find that episode and all the show notes to that one attheamazingseller.com/228 and get all of the transcripts and the show notes there and all of the discussion, if I can talk here, today.

First I want to also say welcome back and I know that was a long intro but I had to expound on that but if you’re just starting on Amazon right now and you’re just starting to listen to this podcast this episode you can listen to it but I don’t want it to discourage you and I don’t want it to overwhelm you because if you’re just starting I do still feel that starting on Amazon is a great place to start because you don’t need a website, you don’t need a list, you don’t need any other technical stuff.

You just need a good product to sell on Amazon, you can still launch the same way that we’ve been doing, you can still use pay-per-click through Amazon as we’ve always done so it’s a great place to start because the traffic is already there, buyers are already there. That’s kind of like the incentive to launching on Amazon. Once we get the ball rolling then we want to pivot a little bit as I’m doing right now currently because I’m feeling the effects of just being on Amazon and I know there’s so much more that I could be leveraging outside of Amazon. If you are just starting you can still listen to this but I don’t want you to really worry about this right now I want you to only focus on launching you first product because that’s critical to making your first sale and then learning the process.

Now if you are brand new and you want to attend one of my live workshops where I do this totally for free and I walk you through the five phases for picking a product and then launching a product and everything in between you can head over totheamazingseller.com/workshop and you can register for an upcoming workshop there. Totally free. I also hangout for live Q&As you can ask any questions there and I would love to have you attend, it’s just a lot of fun.

[00:04:0] Scott: Definitely come check me out over there and we can hang out for the evening or the afternoon whichever time it is at that time but you’re see the current time by heading over to that link. Once again that’s theamazingseller.com/workshop.

[DISCUSSION]

Now, what I want to talk about today though are three types of sales funnel for your business. Now funnels get a bad name, sometimes people are like, “You’re trying to just get sales out of people,” and that’s not necessarily what I’m all about. What I’m all about is really educating people through valuable content then guiding them to those products that could help them achieve what they’re going after whether that’s a problem, whether that’s a passion whether that’s something they’re looking for that you can offer a better service but it’s really about educating them through that sales process.

It’s just been coined out there as like a sales funnel, a sales channel, however you want to call it. We’re going to refer to that as like a sales funnel, sales channel and we’re going to walk through that. I’m going to give you three examples of ones that work really well and they’re not that difficult to get started but I’m not going to go through all of the setup because there are some things that you have to do to do that but I want you to understand how it works and how it can work. There’s hundreds of different ways that you can do this but I really just want you to wrap you head around what is possible and why you might want to be thinking about doing this.

The best way to build a sustainable business in my opinion is to control the sales flow. Look at Vistaprint. If you’ve ever bought anything online from Vistaprint they really know how to guide you through the process. You start by going there, filling out your business card that you want to have created and then through the checkout process they’re giving you other things that could be related to that business card because they’re in business and they know because you qualified yourself by that first initial setup that you did for creating that particular business card.

[00:06:08] Scott: Then they take you through other related products that could help you in your business. Could be pens to give out to your customers, it could be mouse pads, it could be post cards so that you can send them to your customers after the order. There’s a whole bunch of things that they give you the opportunity to buy on the way out. That’s a sales funnel, a sales channel and they’re guiding you to that flow. Similar to Amazon. Amazon knows by what you bought, by what other products other people are interested in by looking at the sales history.

But guess what some of those products that they’re putting in front of your customers are someone else’s products, they’re not yours. What we want to do is we want to be able to guide them through the sales process or the sales funnel by us controlling the flow. Again let me just reiterate this, it doesn’t mean that you don’t pay attention to Amazon and you don’t sell on Amazon. You do that’s just another channel it’s a diversification of our revenue.

If we can earn even 25% of our sales off of Amazon that’s pretty good depending on what you’re doing right now currently. I recently interviewed a guy by the name of Mike Jackness. I met him in Miami at the seller summit that I spoke at and it was really awesome to be sitting in the room with him because he was going through his whole sales process and his sales funnel.

I actually had him come on the podcast, it was episode 219, if you want to check it out. Again I’ll link it up on the show notes to this but you can always head over totheamazingseller.com/219.

He goes through how he sells colored pencils for the adult coloring industry. It’s pretty amazing. Most of his sales come from his sales channel not from Amazon and he set that up by design. He didn’t do that just because that’s the way it’s happening.

[00:08:00] Scott: It proves that this is definitely something that you want to pay attention to and something you probably want to implement sooner than later.

What I want to do here is I want to ask you a question, “What if you could pay $1 and make $2 or what if you could pay $1 and make $3 or $5 or $10, who wouldn’t want that?” It’s kind of the internet marketers that say it’s like your ATM machine. Well it’s kind of true in a sense, it’s kind of spammy to say it like that but if you can invest a dollar in advertising and then in turn create a $2 return on that that’s pretty good, or $3 or $5 and there’s ways that you can do that.

Now what people need to understand too is a lot of people look for the sale like day one. In Amazon if we get someone to hit our listing what we do is we have an opportunity to convert them. We talk about conversions a lot. We have that one chance to convert them usually it’s just that one chance. Chances of them coming back if they haven’t added us to the cart are pretty slim. Now Amazon has been known to do some re-targeting of their own but it doesn’t always mean that it’s going to happen but it could happen and that’s cool.

But for the most part they’re not going to come back and look for your item. You’re not going to be able to remind them because you don’t own the customer data, you don’t own any of that stuff that you can give them. Understand that once someone hits your listing on Amazon they’re there and if you don’t convert them right away you’re probably not going to convert them unless they come back looking for you.

We want to set it up so this way and how would this be? Again another question for you. What if you could have someone see your item or maybe a piece of content around your item and then you have a pixel that basically allows you, if you’re not technically or not thinking about pixels and all that stuff, if you don’t understand what that stuff means it’s okay. Don’t worry about it. It’s not that big of a deal.

[00:10:07] Scott: But really what it is is putting a little snippet of code onto a page that they land on and then allows you to retarget them. Google’s been doing it for years but now Facebook allows you to do that as well. They’ve been doing it for probably the past year and a half now I’d say, maybe two years but it’s getting more and more powerful where you’re able to build these custom audiences and all of this stuff.

Wouldn’t that be awesome if someone landed on your page that you directed them through a paid add and maybe they didn’t convert to a sale that day but maybe you could follow them around in a little way that helps to educate them more to get them to come back to your content piece or to your product that could potentially help them. That’s what we’re talking about. That is so real, that’s totally happening right now and it gets even deeper once you get into Facebook like the analytics and more targeting options and per age and demographic. It’s just really, really crazy. I’m getting a little off track here and I don’t want to but it gets me pretty excited because there’s a ton that we can do but the easy way is jumping on Amazon and letting their listing convert and if doesn’t convert you just wait for that next customer.

I think it’s so much more valuable to be able to get someone to see your product or your content and then from there be able to follow up with them either through email or retargeting. You have a better chance of getting them to know they can trust you not just through your reviews that are on your listing. Let me ask you another question, “What if you could help people by delivering useful content and give it to them by email and then have someone buy your products immediately?” Some people will and there is a bigger percentage that won’t. But what if they were to come back and buy six weeks from now after they know they can trust you because you delivered some really great information about that.

[00:12:06] Scott: Now wouldn’t that be awesome? Doesn’t that make sense? I think there’s a study out there that says it takes usually six to nine times to see something before you actually make that commitment to buy. You have to make six to nine different touch points before you know, like and trust that business. Amazon has a lot of trust because of Amazon. It’s just what it is. Everyone knows Amazon, they trust the platform, they know if they’ve a problem they’re going to be able to get their money back and all that stuff and that’s great. We need to create that for our own brand by educating them through the process letting them know that we’re there for them. Letting them know that if they have any problems we’re going to be able to help them with that and we’re then able to then also show them some testimonials or some reviews of our own through email.

There’s a ton that we can do to help them know they can trust us. That’s what I really want you guys to understand and I want you to take away and I’m going to cover three types of sales funnels for your business that to me that they’re not that difficult to setup or to implement and actually there’re some that I’m using right now and I’m going to be reporting back on. I’ll let you guys know how they do. But understand this, you’re not just going to setup like a sales funnel like day one and it’s going to be profitable. You have to still do the same thing that you would do with your listing.

You have to test it, you have to tweak it. Maybe that offer isn’t that great of an offer maybe you got to mix that offer up and change something so it attracts the right buyer and then from that buyer you have to know what they want next and you have to just kind of play around with it till you get it. Once you get it, maybe you invest $400 or $500 into paid ads to see what works, once you get it to work you can then scale that, then you can start to really ramp up your paid traffic.

[00:14:01] Scott: Also just a little side note, when you do the content route where you’re actually educating people and you’re publishing stuff on your blog or your website you’ll also get the SEO the search engine optimization benefits of this. Then you’re going to start getting some organic traffic to your site which then in turn will allow them to enter your sales funnel of education to sale.

Again there’s a whole bunch of different ways that this will help to give a business legs and it will also make it stronger for the future. Really, really important that you understand that. Now one little golden nugget I want to give right here and I want you to just really think about this because what I just said to you probably should make you say, “Wow, that’s pretty amazing and that makes total sense Scott.” The one little golden nugget I want to give you is that having a person’s email address right now and in the future is very, very powerful for so many reasons.

If you understand that and you don’t just think like well I’m just going to go after and get the next customer, the next customer, the next customer that’s great but you need to capitalize on the customers that already paid you, that already reached into their pocket and paid you. Amazon doesn’t allow us to take advantage of those buyers, we all know that. If we can do that, if we can grab those email addresses of people that we know are our prospects or customers those right there are gold and if you understand that I’m telling you… Look at Mike Jackness perfect example.

He ran a contest and I’m going to go over that really quickly to give you an idea of what that looks like but he ran a contest to just get interest and he was giving away a free coloring set of pencils.

[00:16:02] Scott: They were like $40, $50 pencils for the adult coloring industry and he was able to build an email list and I think he said like 20,000 or 30,000 people. Imagine having 20,000 or 30,000 people that enter to win these colored pencils but yet they all didn’t win but guess what we know now that they’re interested in adult coloring.

Just let that in sink for a second and let that be your golden nugget from this episode, right there. That right there to me is exciting and it’s powerful. Just really, really try to understand that. It allows you to carry on that conversation after they hit your listing or the product page on your website not on Amazon so that’s what I mean. It’s different. If you get someone that lands on your listing on Amazon it’s cool, that’s good but it doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to follow up with them. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to carry on a conversation with them. An email address will allow you to do that.

Also understand this, a lot of people say, “Well Scott emails marketing is kind of dead, isn’t it?” Well Mike Jackness says it’s not and also I believe that the other benefit which you may or may not know if you can take those email addresses that you’ve collected and you can upload them into Facebook into your ad manager and now you can create a custom audience with those email addresses and then from there you can then do some retargeting to them. Then guess what else you can do, you can also take that audience and then you can create a look alike audience through Facebook. Again I’m getting a little bit ahead but just to let you know what is out there. This stuff is powerful. It’s really, really powerful and again you’re building an asset for your business.

[00:18:00] Scott: With Amazon right now we’re building an asset in the sense that we’re building a brand on Amazon, we’re using Amazon’s credibility and their authority but we really don’t own the process or the sales channel. Again that’s just another part of the business. There’s a lot of businesses that start off selling off of Amazon and then they want to graduate and go on Amazon and that’s fine too. It’s just another leg, another channel, another revenue stream and that’s really what you need to think about when you go through this process.

That’s what I’m thinking about right now. I don’t think I would be doing you any good telling you that you should just build everything on Amazon and I don’t think I’ve ever done that. Yes I’ve said it’s very easy to get started there because you don’t need all the tech stuff but I’ve always said that building an email list when you can, whether it’s insert card, whether it’s doing a promotion and grabbing the emails you definitely need to be doing that and I’ve always said that you should be doing that as soon as possible.

But not to overcomplicate the process in the beginning when you’re starting you probably don’t want to go down that route. Guess what, because you don’t want to learn all that other stuff. I get it. At this point if you’re up and running with a product or two and you’re building a brand in a market this is definitely something you need to consider. Now let’s kind of dig in here and kind of go through how these sales funnels can work. Again like I said there’s multiple different angles you can take with sales funnels but I’m going to give you three right now.

We’re just going to be scratching the surface but let me just kind of give you the look of like what one would look like. Number one the first one that I want to kind of go over is creating blog content. People say too are blogs dead? No they’re not dead. Blogs are still very, very popular. There’s a lot of blogs out there just like Amazon products and people say well it’s saturated.

[00:20:01] Scott: It’s not because you’re not out there just creating this content for organic reach. You’re not just out there trying to rank you’re blog. What you’re doing is you’re creating a blog for your home base so this way here you can also drive paid advertising to the blog so then you can start to retarget from the blog and then you can control that whole experience. The blog is really just a glorified website. It’s a website that has a blog built in but I’ll be calling it a blog because it’s really about content and about your products.

You ecommerce store will reside there as well. All the ecommerce store really is is a shopping cart integrated into your blog. Basically what we want to do is we want to create some content that we know that our audience is going to need and want. We might want to start off and this is what we’ve actually been doing right now is where we find ten questions that our customers or potential customers have right now and there’s a bunch of different ways you can do this.

You can go out there and do the work yourself or you can just hire a VA and say, “Hey my market is fishing for BAS try to get specific, what are the ten biggest questions out there that are being asked on forums, on Facebook groups and all that? What are the top ten questions that are being asked?” You can hire a VA to do that. You can go toUpwork.com, fiver you can go to a bunch of different places and hire someone. I know Chris Tucker has a service, virtual staff find you can find someone there but that’s more for like a long term thing but if you just want like a one off job definitely worth looking at upwork.com and finding someone to do that research for you and then what they’ll do is they’ll compile it.

You might even want have them give you the top twenty or something then you can pick the top ten. Then what you do is you have content created around those questions and then those are the ones that you’re going to be publishing.

[00:22:03] Scott: Now that’s also going to allow you to link back to your products. When these blog posts are created you’re going to have links in there not a bunch, you’re not going to go ahead and just have link after link after link. Maybe one, two or three links leading back naturally where it would make sense to your product.

That product is going to basically go back to your ecommerce store on your blog or if you don’t have that part set up yet then just link it back to Amazon. You just want that content to be wrapped around your product links. Again that’s really important that you understand that you have this content there for people to consume and then also educate and in the process you have links that are throughout that post that link back to your product.

Then you take a Facebook ad, you find the audience very easy to do just go out there and find different groups or actually groups I’m not sure if you can target as of yet, I know they’re talking about it but you can definitely target demographics or you can just target Facebook fan pages. That’s another great way to do it. Then from there you just go ahead and start running ads to those blog posts.

You might want to create one really epic blog post and it might even be compiled of all of those blog posts that you just did but maybe summaries of them. Then all those linked over to all the individual ones. What this is really doing, it’s allowing you to advertise a Facebook ad to a blog post. In that blog post is going to be the information that you're advertising. Maybe it’s a review guide about what you need to know about the custom fishing rod or the top 10 fishing rods or something like that. I know Spencer Huss has done this really well on all his case studies over at Niche Pursuits. If you want to see how this stuff is mapped out, you can always go over tonichepursuits.com and check that out.

[00:24:02] Scott: Maybe I can even have Spencer on at some point and we can go through the basics of setting this stuff up and the methodology and stuff. Basically, you're doing this to educate your potential customer, also have an opportunity for them to buy something, also on that page somewhere you will have a place for them to opt in. They can join your newsletter or maybe they can get a free coupon or maybe a 25% off discount or maybe they can enter a contest or something like that but a way for them to enter their email address. Then from there, in the background you’re going to add a Facebook ad pixel, again I don’t want to get too techy, but it’s pretty easy to do inside of the ad manager. You can even hire somebody to set this stuff up for you but you add a Facebook ad pixel on that page. Whether they jump on that page and then two seconds later they leave, they’re going to be pixeled and they're going to be added to a custom audience.

This is where they compile all of the people that hit that page and then we can create what they call a retargeting audience. Then we can set a new ad up that then targets them, those people. We can try to get them back to either that piece of content or we can drive them back to a different piece of content on the blog. Then that way there we can continually allow them to see our stuff. The next piece of this would be when they're on that page, like I’d said, you want a place for them to be able to enter their email address. You can have something what they call as a content upgrade.

Maybe your content goes into detail but maybe you can give them a checklist or maybe you can give them a special guide or maybe you can give them a video walking them through how to do this certain thing.

[00:26:00] Scott: Then you can have them enter their email address to get that. What I've seen that really works well on lead pages is what I always use for what they call a lead box. It’s where you would click on that link and then it would open up like a pop window that would allow you to fill in your name and email address. It’s just less intrusive. This way here you don’t feel like an email opt-in raid of the bat. If they want it, they're going to click on it and then the opt-in form would appear. I've talked about lead pages, they're on my resources page. If you guys want to go check them out, definitely go do that.

You can go do that, you can go through my affiliate link over there, buy me a cup of coffee which would be amazing. You can head over totheamazingseller.com/resources and you will find lead pages there and you can check them out. I've been using them now for probably two years and I love them. Just a really easy way to set up the opt-in pages and lead boxes and stuff like that. That’s in a content upgrade. Then the next part of this funnel is you're going to be sending new emails to your subscribers through drip campaign or an auto-responder.

You'll need something like AWeber or MailChimp or any of those auto-responders will work. It’s really where you're just going to be giving them a piece of content. Maybe the first week you give them one every other day and then maybe you give them one every single week. This is a great way for you to bring great value to your potential customers and educate them through that and, one more and, also give them the opportunity to buy your stuff.

This allows us to deliver that value over time through blog posts. Like I said, you can always mention your product in the content which I think you should do but my rule of thumb here is if you're going to do a drip campaign, I like three to one. It’s like three pieces of valuable content with very, very light pitch. That means you have the email written with no pitch but it drives them to a blog post and in that blog post, there are some mentions of some products that you offer.

[00:28:00] Scott: The fourth email that one there you can put a little coupon in there or a little code or a little pitch. It’s kind of Gary Vaynerchuk, you know, “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook”. It’s the same idea, you want to give them value, value, value and then it’s okay to give them a little pitch. Give them some special discounts for subscribers any of that stuff. Maybe you're going to run a new contest, you can let people know about that. That’s a great way. That’s like funnel number one, it’s really like building out some content. You don’t have to have a ton, you can start with five pieces of content with five emails that go out.

It’s just a great way though for you to be able to drive people from a paid ad to a blog post, get them on that page so then you can start retargeting them through a Facebook ad pixel and then carry on that conversation through a drip campaign. That’s sales funnel number one. Pretty exciting stuff, I hope you guys are getting as excited as I am explaining. I love this stuff.

Number two, the funnel number two that I'm going to talk about or sales channel, whatever you want to call it is you want to create a giveaway. A great way to do this and this is something that I'm in the process of planning out right now on a third brand that I'm going to be involved in, is really taking other products, not even my products because I want to start building that list today. I don’t even have the first product launched yet, I don’t even have the first piece of content written, I don’t even have the blog created yet.

I want to start building an email interest list in a sense. How do I do that? What I can do is I can grab three, four, five other products, small products, they don’t have to be that big but maybe they can be $10 or $15 a piece or maybe 20 bucks a piece. Maybe that thing is worth a hundred bucks and you literally can buy these all from Amazon, get them shipped to your house and then start doing a giveaway. You can do a giveaway to then start getting interest by having them enter their email address to enter the contest.

[00:30:03] Scott: Now, that’s if you don’t have a current product. If you currently have a product, use your product as the giveaway. Give them a discount code whatever you want to do in order to… I wouldn’t give them a discount code at that point, I would give them totally free. What I would do is I would then have them enter their email address to enter to win and then over the next seven days what you’ll do is collect the email addresses and then you announce the winner. I’ll go through that here in a second. What you'll do here is that on that giveaway page, you can create that giveaway page in lead pages, again just a simple landing page, kind of a countdown on it.

Maybe you're going to do it for seven days, it would say, “There’s only three days, 24 hours and 22 seconds before you pull the winner,” and that’s pretty cool. They can also share that page with other people, so that way there it gets a little bit of viral attention. On that page we’re going to do another thing, which we talked about in the first one, which is we’re going to add the Facebook ad pixel too there, so we can then build that audience even if they don’t enter their email address because now we can build that audience inside of Facebook by retargeting them through that pixel.

Again if we already have some blog content created, well guess what, we can start sending them to some useful and some helpful information that can get them to know, like and trust you through that drip campaign that we talked about before. We would capture the email, we’d have them enter their email address to enter the contest, we would send them to a thank you page and on that thank you page, again that thank you page is just a very simple page, it has very little on it. It just says, “Hey, thanks for entering the contest. I wish you luck. We’ll be announcing the winner on this date, and oh, by the way feel free to invite your friends. Here is a couple of share options Facebook, Twitter, whatever.” Then they can share that page. Then what you will do is after the seven days, you're going to pull the winner.

[00:32:00] Scott: They have a tool out there calledrandom.org and you can just tally up one through 500, however many you collected. Then what you can do is you can see when they joined by looking at your email provider, maybe AWeber or whatever. Then you can just randomly pick a number and then you’ll pick the winner. That’s how we do it on our workshops when we do a giveaway there. That’s a easy way to do it. Then what you will do is you will email everyone and you will say, “Hey, congratulations to Beverly Smith. Awesome job. Great, so happy for you. You’ve won. Please contact us and if you didn’t win, it’s okay we’ve got something special for you too. A special 25% off discount to all of you that entered because we really appreciate you taking the time to do so.”

So, we’re still giving them something of value and it’s not like a hard pitch. They signed up to win that thing, so why not give them an offer to buy that thing. Then again, we would follow up with emails with useful content. I wouldn’t spam them I would send it out every couple of days. This is going to build some good will. It’s going to allow us to create that trust element that we need. It’s also going to allow them to have more chances to buy our stuff through the content that we delivered. Do not stuff the content with links. Make it natural. Again, I want to go back to Mike Jackness because he did this exact thing that I just covered with you, exactly.

He created a giveaway with his colored pencils. He ran them, I think he did one every single day and then he had like different dates though for them. Then he would announce the winner at the end of seven days and then he would give a discount code to anyone that didn’t win. He said it covered the cost of his ads and then said he built a massive email list.

[00:34:03] Scott: Guess what else this helped him do? It helped him pick the next product. He was actually going to go into watercolors and after he polled his audience, his 30,000 plus people, they all said, “No, we’re not really into the watercolors, we like colored pencils.” Guess what, he didn’t create that product. That’s huge, that is huge. Hopefully you understand that. Hopefully you understand that. Moving on, let’s go to the last sales funnel that I want to go over with you. Again, this is a little bit more advanced but still want to give it to you.

This is something that’s been circulating out there. It works really well. It’s a free plus shipping offer. You may have seen this, you may have seen like a book, “Get the book for free plus $5.99 shipping.” Then as soon as you buy that you get a little bump in sale, they call it a sales bump, upsell, whatever you want to call it. It’s a way for them to acquire a customer. They're giving a real book away, sometimes losing money on that book but they know that the percentages are a lot higher to get someone to buy something else down the road, even if it isn’t on the next page.

The way that this would work is you would run a Facebook ad to that free plus shipping offer. Really easy to do. Same thing you would target an audience it’s very similar to that’s targeted to your market and all of that. Then from there you would set it up so that they can get the book for free plus the shipping. Then you would have to set up something that would allow them to have a one click upsell. Again, what I would do here is I would take the Facebook ad pixel and drop it on that free plus shipping offer page. If you have that page on your blog, you're going to want to drop that pixel on there because why?

[00:36:02] Scott: Well, because you want to create that custom audience that you're paying for. You're paying for people to come to a page. Once they hit that page, why not create another audience inside of Facebook that now you can target in the future or you can just give them more useful content. The way that it would look is this, you would create that Facebook ad to the free offer plus shipping offer, put the Facebook pixel on there to create that custom audience. Immediately after they would accept that, they would be presented with another offer. That offer could be… Let’s just say that you were selling a supplement. An easy upsell here or next offer could be like the free plus shipping offer was one bottle for free plus $5.99 shipping of 30 days or 60 day supply.

The next logical offer would be like, “Hey, thanks so much for accepting this free offer. We’ve got another great offer for you for taking action and we would love to give you two more bottles for 50% off our regular price. So, for just $19.97 you can get two more bottles. That would be 120 day supply for just $19.97 plus free shipping,” or something like that. That way there that offer not everyone will accept that offer but some will and the some that do will offset your ad spend.

They call it a liquidating offer. It’s where you're going to be able to take that expense for ads and reduce that or even eliminate it by giving them that extra offer. Really what you need to understand is we’re not necessarily saying that we’re going to make all the money from that offer. We’re really looking to just take our cost for acquiring a customer and just reducing that so that way there in the future the long term sales for these customers is what you're really looking at.

[00:38:06] Scott: Because then what we’re going to do is this same exact thing. We’re going to send emails that we’re going to be educating them, we’re going to be building the goodwill and creating the “know, like and trust” element that we need. Again, I would stick to the three or four pieces of content that’s just pure content, pure value to a one pitch. Maybe send three or four emails before you make that, “Hey, we know that you're really been enjoying this content and we wanted to reward you by giving you 25% off any of our products this week, only just because you are one of our email subscribers, newsletter subscribers, VIP subscriber.” Whatever it is, you just want to make it sound as though you're doing them a favor, which you are because they are taking time to read your emails and your content.

Those are three pretty basic, some are a little more complicated but it doesn’t have to be. Just as long as you understand this process is really what I want you to take away. The easiest, the very easiest one to do is the giveaway. The giveaway one is super easy to do. You're able to acquire prospects in customers like right out of the gate. That email list that you're building, is so hyper-targeted because people enter to win that thing. That thing is what you sell. That’s a no-brainer. I would say that wouldn’t be my first one. The content one would probably be the next because I do believe long term that one there is going to help educate and build that ‘know I can trust’ element.’ Also think about this, you can almost do that like a one, two punch, where you did the giveaway offer, the sales funnel, and then you led them into your content drip through that and then did the retargeting thing as well.

[00:40:07] Scott: There’s a lot of different things we can do. You guys seeing like I just threw a ton at you and I don’t want you guys to get overwhelmed, especially if you're brand new. Don’t worry about this, don’t worry about this right now. It’s here for you, you can come back and listen to this episode if you need to. I will be doing more in the future as I roll out my own stuff, I'll be going through it, I'll be giving you the play by play. Giving you the test results, what worked, what didn’t work and all that because it’s something that I'm really excited about but I know that it’s going to be something that we all need to do and we should be doing. If I go all the way back to when I started selling photography product, digital type products online almost eight, nine years ago, if followed a very similar model to this.

I delivered value upfront and then from there I delivered products that matched up to what my email subscribers were telling me and then I just continue to rinse and repeat that. Over time, I was able to build the trust through the brand, not just myself and then from there it was just a no-brainer. When we would roll something out it would sell. It works the same way. I've seen it work in my own stuff but I've seen it work in a lot of other businesses. If you even look at the bigger businesses like Vista Print or look at Go Daddy. Go Daddy is another one that does a really good job at upselling through that sales channel. Now, Go Daddy and Vista Print they're not really geared towards content. They're not going to be giving you ways that you can build your business on a daily basis but they're doing a sales funnel for what you’ve purchased in the past. They are targeting you with other stuff that you're interested in.

[00:42:01] Scott: I like the content around a market because then you could educate and you're not being salesy at all and you can just build that “know, like, and trust” very, very easily and it’s just the right way to do it in my book. All right guys, I covered a ton there. You guys can tell. I get super excited about this. I actually went into detail about this and kind of scratched the surface a little bit at our TAS breakthrough live event and everyone was going crazy after I talked about this and we just scratched the surface. It’s exciting stuff. I get really, really pumped about this. I want to give you guys that are brand new that are just listening or maybe just got started your focus is Amazon. You're focus is to get your sales up and running on Amazon, know the system, create a good product. The only thing I would say is definitely make sure that you focus on a market and not just a product.

That would be my personal advice. It doesn’t mean that you can't go out there and just take a barrage of products and throw them out there and see what’s tick. You can do that. I don’t like that model because it’s like the retail arb model where you're throwing a bunch of stuff out there and selling some, and not selling some. I would rather, me personally, again this is my personal take, I would rather build something around a market and then have that market keep telling me what they want and what they need and then delivering it to them.

It’s just again a personal preference. You can pick what you want to do. If you're brand new like I said, I want to mention the workshop once again. I do a live workshop walking you through how to pick your product, how to source your product, how to launch it, everything in between, how to make your first dollar on Amazon. I do that on this free live workshop, you can register for an upcoming one by heading over to theamazingseller.com/workshop and I'll walk you through all that. I also hang out there live at the end, do some Q&A and all of that stuff.

[00:44:08] Scott: I want to remind you guys too that we do have full show notes to this episode and all the others, transcripts, links all that stuff that I mentioned. This one here will be episode 230. Again, the link to this will be theamazingseller.com/230 and you can grab all that over there. All I ask from you guys is just go out there and take some action, report back to me, let me know what you're doing. Maybe things that worked, what didn’t work and I can report back. The only other little favor is maybe share this with other people that you think would get value from the podcast.

If you haven’t left any iTunes love, I would love for you to do that. Head over to iTunes, leave me your review, some feedback over there and that would be really, really cool.

All right guys that is going to wrap it up. Now remember, I'm here for you, I believe in you, I'm rooting for you but you have to, you have to… Come on say it with me, say aloud, say it proud, “Take action.” Have an awesome amazing day and I'll see you right back here on the next episode. Now go get em!

Wow! CONTENT HEAVY! I think it would be great if you uploaded a quick guide for the three outlined strategies. They could be similar to guides you’ve uploaded in the past about things like Amazon launch plans.

Hey Scott, great podcast, some good info here. Some questions: for the give-away option, why would you bother getting it shipped to your place first, and then shipping to the winner? Why not just ship straight from amazon?

Also, for collecting emails using a Facebook ad, do you suggest creating a separate lead page; or can you just use your website instead? I’d it worth it to build a separate lead page?

Hey Tony, you could certainly ship it directly to the winner, but if you have multiple pieces from different places it’s nice to send it to them in one box. If you’re looking to collect emails, you generally want to have a dedicated landing page, you can use a page on your site for it, but the templates from leadpages tend to convert better than most webpages!